Ever since Astranis announced their intention to provide secure comms for the US Government, they have been looking forward to having an on-orbit satellite that could be used to demonstrate exactly that. They now have a satellite active and operational in geostationary orbit and are ready to put it to the test. Astranis has announced that they have signed a contract with a trusted partner of the national security space community to demonstrate secure end-to-end communications using the Arcturus satellite.

As the Russian cyberattacks on a satellite system just before the invasion of Ukraine proved, space is increasingly becoming a contested domain. Their adversaries have shown their willingness to target commercial satellite networks, and the Department of Defense is now laser-focused on improving the resiliency and responsiveness of on-orbit assets to ensure warfighters can stay connected and secure.

Three Astranis MicroGEO satellites operating together in orbit

That is part of the reason why they at Astranis have engaged the Department of Defense and spent their own private dollars to develop industry-leading Software-Defined Radio technology — flexibility is the key to reliability in on-orbit communications in a contested environment.

As part of this effort, Astranis will use the Arcturus satellite to demonstrate secure uplink and downlink from San Francisco to Alaska, and back. This on-orbit test was scoped and planned out extremely quickly — a vast improvement over legacy approaches that may have taken years to come together. This demo shows the growing agility to rapidly address national security needs with Astranis's MicroGEO and could lead to the procurement of multiple, dedicated satellite assets in the future.

This will be the next tech demonstration performed using the Astranis Arcturus satellite, but it isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last. Astranis has worked closely with both commercial and government customers to demonstrate the successful operation of the Astranis-designed payload, and all Astranis hardware on board Arcturus continues to work perfectly.

Click here to learn about Astranis' MicroGEO Satellites for Commercial Connectivity.